by Daniel Duane
Alice, unaware that she was setting me free, outlined precisely the moves I’d made on my own.
11
Gluttony as Heroism
“Voracious appetite,” Montanari tells us, has long been linked to “a physical and muscular concept of power.” In the early Middle Ages, when a tribal chief had to be the strongest and bravest man in town, he displayed this “animal-like, even bestial superiority” in part through hunting wildlife, but equally in his gorging on the kill, asserting his right to the greatest portion. Montanari argues that all this faded in the later Middle Ages, when “the nobleman was no longer only the warrior, and physical strength … no longer his most important attribute.” With an increasing value placed on courtliness, according to this line of reasoning, “the sign of nobility henceforth was no longer the capacity to eat in quantity, but rather (and above all) the ability to know how to distinguish the good from the bad, and ultimately to master self-restraint and self-control.” Far from vanquishing the old order, however, this new prissiness has come simply to coexist with it in our minds, such that even in the middle of the last century you could have the infinitely discriminating A. J. Liebling refer to “the heroic age before the First World War, [when] there were men and women who ate, in addition to a whacking lunch and a glorious dinner, a voluminous souper after the theater.” Jack Nicholson might have been expressing disapproval when he quipped to Jim Harrison that “only in the Midwest is overeating still considered an act of heroism,” but he recognized the idea’s persistence nonetheless. Same for Frederick Exley, in the opening pages of his magnificent novel A Fan’s Notes, when Exley-the-narrator (as opposed to Exley-the-author; it’s complicated) refers to a weekend of “nearly heroic” drinking. All of these men, I believe, express the widespread feeling that extreme gastronomic self-indulgence, however you judge it on moral terms, can indeed display certain of the attributes classically associated with heroism: bravery, daring, courage, spirit, fortitude, and boldness, say, if not quite gallantry, selflessness, or valor. It’s that quality of letting go, giving free reign to one’s essential nature, taking a risk and throwing off constraint; it displays the individual’s willingness to do what everybody else only wishes they had the guts to try.
There’s a quality of self-congratulation in this, too: no less an observer than M. F. K. Fisher, in An Alphabet for Gourmets, says she “cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to the bursting point, on anything from quail financière to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly.” Fisher doesn’t see anything wrong with this, openly pitying, as she does, anyone “who has not permitted himself this sensual experience, if only to determine what his own private limitations are, and where, for himself alone, gourmandism ends and gluttony begins.” Having deeply enjoyed these indulgences, in whatever rare instances we’ve undertaken them, we carry thereafter the warm glow of having said, in essence, Fuck it, I’m going in, and that colors the way we look at others doing the same. As for the G word, I believe that gluttony has lost considerable power for the reason cited by Francine Prose, in her monograph Gluttony. This particular sin, she points out, doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible, nor does it hurt anybody but the glutton. And yet, early Christian thinkers were borderline obsessed with gluttony, considering it the gateway sin toward the hard stuff like anger, envy, and lust. To explain this, Prose conjures the delightful possibility that austere living conditions at medieval monasteries were to blame: so many single men, so little food, so much pent-up rage to vent toward any poor brother prone to grabbing that one extra bread crust.
Still, even today, it’s one thing to permit yourself genuine gut-busting consumption; it’s quite another to make it happen. The food has to be just right, the mood and the company, just so. In my own life, for example, it took a rare and never-to-be-repeated confluence of emotional currents and controversial health hypotheses, starting with my sense that a dive into Elizabeth David and Roy Andries de Groot would qualify as a retrograde movement of the soul, a burrowing back into the cultural warmth of Mother Alice. With Fergus likewise behind me—as much as I loved his food, I felt now that even he would discourage me from replicating it slavishly in the soft California sunshine—I felt my first-ever itch to study the mainstream American male celebrity chefs. Not just Keller, either. In a single order from Amazon, I bought used copies of Eric Ripert’s Le Bernardin Cookbook; Joël Robuchon’s The Complete Robuchon; Mario Batali’s Babbo Cookbook; Tom Colicchio’s Think Like a Chef; Jean-Georges: Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef, by Jean-Georges Vongerichten; and, on a whim, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Flipping through all these books, in a kind of culinary speed dating, I couldn’t decide which to embrace first. Jean-Georges offered an introduction to Asian flavors; Colicchio presented fundamental techniques in a clear, cogent fashion ideal for home practice; and Le Bernardin Cookbook began with a curious account of the deep love between Maguy Le Coze and her late brother, Gilbert Le Coze, with whom she’d founded Le Bernardin. Black-and-white photographs showed the two, as children, in France, kissing romantically, open-mouthed. (“When I fuck Maguy, you cannot call it incest; it is love,” Gilbert once joked to friends, according to a 1994 New York Magazine article about his heart-attack death at age forty-nine.) As for McGee, it was less a book to work your way through than a go-to reference for any time you couldn’t figure out why an emulsion kept breaking. (“Every man I know who cooks seriously owns McGee,” writes Jane Kramer, who claims that she, personally, is “less interested in how things work than in how they taste and whether they taste perfect. And never mind the theories that would have me the victim of some late-capitalist delusion that it’s possible—indeed, my American birthright—to put a purchase on perfection, or even of some embarrassing religion of self-improvement.”)
I still hadn’t settled on a new Kitchen God when I discovered that nearly every one of these men—along with several other famous chefs, including Michael Mina and Guy Savoy—had restaurants in nearby Las Vegas, where fancy food had recently replaced topless girls as the blockbuster sucker-draws for casinos. I could just jump on a plane, in other words, and experience all their culinary styles at once. Then I discovered something else: because Vegas was Vegas, a foreign country where steak is the national food and where American men feel powerfully disinhibited in the opening of their wallets, several of those restaurants were in fact high-end steakhouses: Batali’s Carnevino, Wolfgang Puck’s Cut, Jean-Georges’s Prime Steakhouse, Michael Mina’s Stripsteak. Even the Michelin-starred French places, eponymous Temples of Gastronomy from Joël Robuchon and Guy Savoy, were offering wildly ambitious (and expensive) American beef, with which they never would’ve bothered in a different town. The world’s greatest-ever concentration of culinary talent, as far as I could tell—including many guys I wanted to study—was engaged in a steak-cookery death match. And that’s what I mean about the conditions being right for extreme exploration of my gustatory limits: if I’d merely set out to sample marquee dishes in all these places, I might’ve eaten daintily, fancying myself a food critic. Even on a seafood mission, or a foie gras mission, the protein itself would’ve encouraged a certain self-control. But steaks are different, rivaled perhaps only by genuine barbecue in their power to provoke pathological behavior.
I still don’t think I would’ve gone to the wall—to the very edge of catastrophe—if not for a chance encounter with my father and two lawyer buddies of his before I left. It came about because my father fell twenty-five feet at a rock-climbing gym, landed on his ass, and blew out two vertebrae in the middle of his back. When I arrived at the hospital, my father wore a hospital gown and he lay perfectly flat and still and he suddenly looked so very old, so frail, as if in a dress rehearsal for death—an emotional preview of how it might feel to lose him. He’d made an embarrassing mistake, he told me: tied the climbin
g rope into his leather pants belt instead of his harness. High up on the wall, he’d leaned back to rest on the rope and the belt ripped. I wanted to yell at him for being so reckless with my father’s life, and yet it was so like my father, so like myself: absentminded, losing keys, leaving half-filled coffee cups everywhere. He showed me that he could wiggle his toes but that nerve damage kept him from lifting his left foot upward. He was on a lot of pain medication, and he had to spend several weeks in the hospital, to stabilize his broken back, but it turned out to be a curious blessing.
With my father strapped down and sedated, and eager for company, I finally convinced him that my cooking emerged not from some inexplicably domestic—and therefore unmanly—aspect to my character, but from precisely the obsessive streak that had him studying bootleg tapes of the great flamenco Diego del Gastor, who’d never left his home village and never consented to being recorded, but whom the cognoscenti recognized as the finest flamenco guitarist of all time. Knife-sharpening got us started, and I did feel my father’s attention wane briefly, as if wondering what had happened to his son if his son cared about something so mundane and, worse, so tragically practical as a kitchen knife. But the mood improved as I moved toward the lunatic element: “I mean, now I’ve got like three different wet stones constantly in a pot of water, I’m reading about metallurgy and stropping techniques and I’m all into this guy who’s apparently a reclusive knife-making genius, replicating the ancient Damasacus blade-smith techniques.”
“Isn’t that it?!” Dad said, laughing on his hospital bed. “It’s got to be like only twelve guys in the world even know about your guy. Why are we like this?”
We heard a knock on the room door. Then it opened and we saw his friend Gene, a rail-thin divorce lawyer and weekend musician with the stooped hep-cat carriage of the veteran jazz man. After Gene, a guy named Blumberg stepped into the room—huge, florid, a bon-vivant golfer with a white convertible Mercedes, gorgeous shirts, and bone-white hair swept beautifully back from his tan forehead.
“Danny!” said Blumberg, in his deep, kind, booming voice, eternally charming an imaginary audience. “What a pleasure to find you here!”
“Hey, fellas.”
After a few preliminaries with my father—How’s the food? Nurses treating you okay?—Blumberg turned again to me. “Your dad tells me you’re quite the cook, these days.”
I smiled.
“Well, tell us. What’s next? What’s your next big food adventure?”
I hadn’t yet confessed the Vegas trip to my father, and I felt nervous about doing so: he just wasn’t a Vegas guy, and Liz’s father, Doug, had signed up to come, as had my old liquor-exec buddy, Jon. I thought the Doug part might hurt my father’s feelings, given that he and I had not been away together since our climbing days. So I watched my father’s face for disapproval as I said I’d gotten this magazine assignment to eat every top-drawer steak in every one of nine white-tablecloth restaurants in the course of thirty-six hours, while quizzing each and every chef on how they worked their magic: As Liebling once put it, articulating the boundaries in which a culinary researcher must operate, “Each day brings only two opportunities for field work [lunch and dinner], and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours on the road.” With this in mind, I’d confronted the fact that eating only a single lunch and a single dinner per day would force my mission into a tedious, dreary, interminable week in Sin City. If I doubled up, however, or even tripled or quadrupled up, I could turn the whole mission into a culinary blitzkrieg.
I told my father and his friends also about my developing theory that Vegas was a place that simply had to exist somewhere on earth, so fundamental were the human hungers on which it thrived—Greed, Lust, and Gluttony, the Fun Three of the Seven Deadly Sins. (Who’d build a resort based on Hate, Wrath, Envy, and Sloth?) But what made Vegas so peculiarly American, I told my father and his buddies, was the crazed free-market competition for a piece of the action. Back in the 1950s, this meant opening a gambling hall and selling cheap steaks only to watch the next guy start paying his cocktail waitresses not to wear shirts; so now you’re flying over to Paris and importing an entire French titty show, except then some other casino’s putting up a three-hundred-foot neon sign the suckers can’t miss. And so on, until you’ve got exact replicas of the Eiffel Tower competing with the entire Manhattan skyline and full-scale pirate-ship battles in which huge British sailing frigates genuinely sink in vast manmade lagoons, despite the fact that we’re in one of the driest places on earth.
Gene and Blumberg, it turned out, were old Vegas hands, and they’d been going there since the days of the all-you-can-eat buffets, but they’d also watched the big change in the late 1980s, when Steve Wynn figured out that high-class restaurants were yet another way to wow the yokels—especially if the chef had done some time on TV. One thing had led to another, and Vegas had become a nonstop culinary talent show with unlimited funds, with nearly every big-name American and French cheflured into opening at least one Las Vegas restaurant, sometimes several. The de rigueur Vegas meal had remained the big steak, but all these culinary geniuses, motivated by a perpetually spree-spending male clientele, were now engaged in a decentralized, unplanned, un-monitored, and yet nevertheless world-historic celebrity-chef death match to create the finest, most decadent, most luxurious beef steaks ever experienced by humankind.
This was not a gross overstatement: the newly built $2 billion Wynn Hotel and Casino, to name a single casino, had both the Country Club (self-billed as the “new American steak house”) and SW Steak house, which offered a 42-ounce chile-rubbed double rib eye for $98—a single portion of which could have provided a generous and fairly typical half-pound steak portion to each of five hungry men. Slice it up for stir-fry, throw in some broccoli, and you could feed a Laotian village. But only a block away, at the even newer $2 billion Palazzo Hotel and Casino, fully three of six brand-spanking-new restaurants were also wildly ambitious and expensive steak houses. Morels, a so-called French Steak house, whatever that meant, offered, among other things, a 10-ounce “A-5 Wagyu strip steak frites with parmesan & truffle pommes frites and foie gras butter,” which was about as turbocharged as pure steak decadence could possibly get and doubtless somehow still a bargain at $185. In any other city, that dish would have qualified Morels as the go-to beef-lover’s temple par excellence, but Morels was absolutely outclassed within the same casino, by Wolfgang Puck’s CUT, where the appetizers included Kobe steak sashimi, Prime sirloin steak tartare, and bone marrow flan, and where the steak list offered the discriminating carnivore the opportunity to compare corn-fed Illinois Prime dry-aged twenty-one days with corn-fed Nebraska Prime dry-aged a full thirty-five days, and to compare a crossbreed of Japanese Wagyu and American Angus with purebred Japanese Wagyu, just to be sure you were on top of the key distinctions.
“The way I see it,” I told those guys, in the hospital room, “the very future of steak is currently being defined in Las Vegas, and it’s my duty to go eat it.”
My father did look a little nonplussed by all this bullshit, and he made a light joke about cholesterol, but I was ready for this, too: my own cholesterol had been rising for years, I confessed. And I knew also that “grassfed” was a dirty word in Las Vegas steak houses, and that I would therefore be gorging on the equivalent of morbidly obese adolescent animals slaughtered moments before they would’ve expired from their own toxic adiposity. But I’d been reading Pollan’s second food-related bestseller, In Defense of Food, at about that time, and I’d come across his chapter about the lipid hypothesis, the whole idea that saturated fat clogs the arteries, causing heart disease and turning us into fat people. To be fair, Pollan begins In Defense of Food with his now-famous exhortation to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But I’d been much more excited by his dazzling midbook endorsement of yet another book that I’d run out and bought: Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes,
a monumental assassination of the lipid hypothesis. All over the world, according to Taubes, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British colonial doctors working with hunter-gatherer peoples eating their traditional diets had observed a total absence of the diseases of civilization—obesity, diabetes, heart disease. These doctors had also observed, however, that any time hunter-gatherer groups moved into a colonial capital, adopting a Western diet, they quickly came down with all of these ailments. As for the cause, well, their traditional diets had ranged from the Masai’s eating nothing but cow’s blood, milk, and beef to Eskimos living on seal blubber, so the dietary culprits behind the diseases of civilization simply could not be cholesterol or saturated fat. Taubes then documented, with almost pathological thoroughness, the shoddy science that had made the link between saturated fat, cholesterol, and heart disease in the first place. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence, Taubes demonstrated, pointed rather at foodstuffs universally absent from hunter-gatherer diets but ubiquitous in the Western world: flour and sugar. As a meat-loving man with dangerously high cholesterol, I took this to be the best dietary news ever delivered to mankind. So long as I cut out the cookies and the bread—the stuff that was actually killing me, in other words—I could devour all the meat I could stomach, at every single meal, and I didn’t even have to worry about how happy the animals had been, before the bolt gun punctured their crania.
Gene and Blumberg positively loved this rap. Plus, they knew all about the great chefs I hoped to meet: Savoy, Robuchon. They’d also tasted enough Kobe beef to understand the big price tag at a lot of these restaurants. This, in turn, gave my father the joy of seeing old buddies engage with his son, even throwing out their own anecdotes of excess, like one from Gene about snorting Russian caviar through a hundred-dollar bill, at a Scottsdale golf resort.
